Sheffield landscape management expert calls for public-private partnership funding to help support nature restoration
After a summer of record-breaking heatwaves and devastating wildfires the importance of restoring resilient ecosystems has become impossible to ignore.
Healthy, well-restored ecosystems are among Europe's strongest defences against the pressures of climate change, buffering the effects of drought, fire and flooding over the long term.
Biodiversa+, the European Biodiversity Partnership, has published a series of policy briefs that translate a decade of restoration research and recommendations into practical, phased guidance for implementing the EU Nature Restoration Regulation (NRR).
Tom Wild, Lecturer in Landscape Management in the School of Architecture and Landscape, has contributed to an important new policy brief on public private partnerships (PPPs) for nature restoration, discussing the potential for PPPs to mobilise private capital for nature restoration while generating long-term ecological, economic and societal value. Tom was the only UK member of this Biodiversa+ expert group.
Tom Wild said: "Launching this guidance on how to secure funds for ecosystem restoration at the Banque de France this summer underlines just how seriously finance stakeholders view nature-based solutions and the new regulations. Loss of biodiversity represents a key risk to banks and businesses, and by working with the public and third sector they can reduce these risks whilst increasing social as well as environmental return on investment."
The series comprises eight briefs covering specific ecosystems and the conditions that enable restoration - from seed supply to finance - and offers an evidence-based roadmap to allow Member States to implement the Nature Restoration Regulation effectively.
They also highlight that fewer than one in ten national restoration policies currently address the unintended health or social consequences of restoration, despite the well-established link between land-use change and emerging infectious diseases, and that private financing of nature restoration in Europe remains marginal outside protected areas, despite an estimated €65 billion annual investment need.